Fayoum

Yesterday, we finally made it to Fayoum, an oasis maybe 100km southwest of Cairo.  First, the news that will scare you all: Fayoum is the only place in Egypt that has malaria, and none of us had brought along bug repellent or were on malaria meds.  But not to worry, I don’t think I saw any mosquitoes.

After a to-go koshari breakfast, we left the house at about 8:30 yesterday morning with the driver who’d taken us to Ain Sukhna while Sam was here.  The drive to Fayoum was about two hours through the desert to the southwest.  When we began to reach Fayoum, and things started to get green again, we hit a police checkpoint.  The police wanted to know where we were from and what we were doing.  They talked to Max, and he told them in Arabic that we just wanted to see the sun and nature and beauty, which answer seemed to satisfy them and they asked him to tell him those words – sun, nature, beauty – in English.  But, and I think it was because we were Americans, they decided we needed a police escort, which we really didn’t want.  Five – seriously, five – cops loaded up into a pickup in front of us and made us follow them at high speed to our destination.  Apparently, cops in Egypt tend to do this especially with Americans, probably because America is actually paying for all these cops – it’s not all that well known, but America gives more foreign aid to Egypt than to any nation other than Israel and its embassy in Cairo is the largest embassy in the world.  So as we drove on to our destination, we discussed how we could get the cops to leave us alone since we already stick out well enough in rural places like this as it is.

And our destination.  Everyone, more or less, just agreed to go for a trip but no one really knew where we were going.  Our destination was Lake Qarun, in a national park near Fayoum, which I think everyone figured would be lush and oasis-like.  And, indeed, on the way we drove through some extremely lush areas.  It was very interesting to watch the farming take place as we drove by, and see how they dug the irrigation canals and planted the fields.  But, Lake Qarun wasn’t actually in Fayoum.  We eventually drove through the lushness of the oasis and were in desert again until, suddenly, the desert stopped at a huge lake.  It actually looked more like a beach than any lake I’ve ever been to because of all the sand, as well as the lake’s size.

And, so, we got out.  It seemed absolutely in the middle of nowhere.  There were thatched huts with tables and a little canteen, but little else except for Egyptian families swimming in the lake and old men playing dominoes and smoking sheesha in the shade (where they came from, I can’t really fathom).  Our cops got out with us and set up shop at a table in the shade about as far away from us as they could get (or, rather, they set up first and we set up as far away as possible).  They would spend the rest of the day there, mostly bullshitting and sleeping, and we spent much of it making jokes about them and about what would happen when the evil terrorists came for us.

The canteen had one choice for lunch: tins of tuna, blocks of feta cheese, and veggies with country bread.  We ordered several plates and some drinks and at lunch in the shade.  Before we could sit down, though, the employees insisted on laying down a table cloth, which they didn’t do for any of the tables of Egyptians.  Everyone was far more satisfied with the food than they expected to be.

We just sat around in the shade for a couple hours, with groups of people occasionally walking down to check out the water or the desert or anything else.  The total quiteness of the desert is amazing after being in Cairo.  You walk off alone for a bit, and you hear absolutely nothing but the wind and the sound of your own steps.  Total silence – something that simply doesn’t exist in Cairo.

There is a waterfall at Lake Qarun, and someone told me that it is the only one in Egypt.  Eventually, we decided to walk over to see it.  When we started to walk away from the shaded area, we were followed by a police officer.  Max went and talked to him and asked him why he was following us.  The cop said that the local boys might harass us.  Max said that he’d lived here for two years and hadn’t had any problems and that we’d rather just walk on our own.  The cop, happily, left us on our own.  The reason for not wanting a cop with us is that we already were horribly out of place at Lake Qarun – the only white people among what looked to be less wealthy Egyptian families.  A cop with us would just be embarrassing, because it would signal that we didn’t trust the people we were around, and we really didn’t want that.

At the waterfall, which was quite small – maybe ten or twelve feet high – there was a big group of boys jumping off and swimming around.  They were clearly amused by our presence and started doing flips and the like to show off.  We sat around for a good while and just watched, getting curious looks from families in the area.

Eventually, Sam, one of the guys with us who spoke good Arabic, decided he wanted to jump.  He asked one of the older boys how safe it was and how he needed to jump, and the boy seemed really happy that he was interested and spoke Arabic and took him by the hand over to the waterfall, showing him what to do.  Sam and the boys jumped off a few times and swam, and at this point, the kids became more friendly with us, realizing that many of the people in our group spoke Arabic.  A whole swarm developed around Max and his two friends Sasha and Naomi, and the kids were asking them millions of questions which Max was trying to translate for his friends.  As ever, they were intrigued by the girls.  They were pretty funny, and told us about their village in southern Egypt and what their families did and the like.  Whether being polite or friendly or who knows, they said something in the formulaic and polite Arabic that amounted to, We wish you would come to our house every day and honor us with your presence.  Eventually, Max got exhausted with translation and moved back a bit, and all the kids then gathered around Lizz.  I didn’t hear, but apparently they were all trading jokes in Arabic.  The best part was that the only jokes that Lizz knows in Arabic – which she learned from Syrians while studying there – are racially insensitive against Asians.  The boys seemed to love them.  It was a nice hour or more spent with the kids, and had the cop been with us it would not have happened.  As soon as any of them had started talking to us, the cop would have made them all go away – somethign we’ve seen before in Cairo.  Just last week, Max and his friends were in Islamic Cairo and a kid started talking to them.  Out of nowhere, a man came and put his arm around the kid and started pulling him away, acting very friendly.  Max and his friends thought he was a family member, but someone else in the crowd said he was an undercover cop arresting the child for bothering Max and them.  Max had to have a long argument with the cop to prevent him from arresting the kid for doing basically nothing.  I find this behavior odd – arresting kids for talking to foreigners in certain areas, but allowing the obnoxious hawkers to thrive at the pyramids?

We eventually left the small falls and walked back towards the beach.  We walked towards an area where there were a lot of Egyptian families, and we could see them all looking with interest at us.  The most hilarious part of perhaps the whole day happened when these two middle aged Egyptian women, covered and everything, yelled “Hello!” to us.  Often, people yelling “hello” or “welcome” seem less than friendly, because their tone holds some mockery.  But these women seemed friendly, so someone yelled back.  The response from the women was hilarious: in Arabic, “You are honey.”  Directed at the males, or some specific male, it’s a flirtatious compliment in Arabic.  I doubt they expected us to understand it, though, so when Sam yelled back, “No! You’re honey!” the women giggled, covered their faces with their veils, and ran off.  It was pretty awesome.

Once we got nearer to the water, all the kids swimming started yelling at us: “Welcome” “Hello!” “Take our picture.”  Some came and talked to us, and were excited that some among us spoke Arabic, and they followed us around for a while.  Ben, who had bought this absurd sombrero hat from this guy selling crap near the waterfall, waded out into the lake and talked to some of the kids.  Because of the big hat it was a pretty hilarious scene.

We walked eventually to the end of the beach, to an area of some random shrubs and plants, but by that time were so hot most of us decided to go back to the shade and have a drink while some others decided to swim.  I was among those wanting a cold bottle of coke, and we spent several hours back in the shade talking or in the sun playing frisbee between random mini sandstorms.

Around five, our driver came up to us and told us the cops were making us leave.  They had to be back at base, and they wanted us to come to.  We went looking for Max and after we finally found him and the rest of the stragglers, we loaded up and left.

The ride home, like the rid home from the beach, was very quiet.  Most people were exhausted by the day in the very, very hot sun, and I at least spent the whole ride staring out the window looking at the landscape and taking a few pictures.

One of the stranger sites I saw on the drive home was this huges cemetery in the middle of the desert.  It went on for a mile along the highway and seemed very deep as well.  It was made up exclusively of big tombs, all of which looked identical.  I wonder what it’s for – whether it serves Cairo or somewhere else entirely.

Once back in town, we had to stop at the gas station to fill up.  Everyone got out of the car but Deborah and I, and at one point a gas station attendant came up to my window and said, in English, “Welcome. Where are you from.” I told him I was from America, and he, of course, said, “oh,  George Bush.”  I laughed, and he asked me in English what I thought of George Bush.  I told him in Arabic that I thought he was the worst president ever.  The attendant was really surprised by the Arabic, and started asking me a lot more questions and called over another attendant, telling him that I had called Bush the worst president in Arabic.  Then they wanted to know why I was in Egypt, and I said to work.  They asked where, and I told them that I worked in human rights.  Human rights! they said, there are no human rights in the Arab world.  They went on to just laugh about the very idea of human rights in Egypt and said they are “underground.”  I’m not sure what that means.

Once home, I went to have koshari for dinner with a couple of people from the trip and then went home and basically collapsed from heat and sunburn.

TOTALLY UNRELATED: Not at all relevant, but I saw this last night and thought it hilarious.  Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review Online asks:

Wouldn’t George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher?

I can’t even begin to fathom what would make someone ask that question, much less answer it in the affirmative.